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Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects — everything from films, games, and music to art, design, and technology. Our mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We are a Public Benefit Corporation based in Brooklyn, New York.

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Thousands of creative projects are funding on Kickstarter at any given moment. Each project is independently created and crafted by the person behind it. The filmmakers, musicians, artists, and designers you see on Kickstarter have complete control and responsibility over their projects. They spend weeks building their project pages, shooting their videos, and brainstorming what rewards to offer backers. When they're ready, creators launch their project and share it with their community.

Every project creator sets their project's funding goal and deadline. If people like the project, they can pledge money to make it happen. If the project succeeds in reaching its funding goal, all backers' credit cards are charged when time expires. If the project falls short, no one is charged. Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing.

Why do people back projects?

A lot of backers are rallying around their friends' projects. Some are supporting people they've long admired. Many are just inspired by a new idea. Others are inspired by a project's rewards — a copy of what's being made, a limited edition, or a custom experience related to the project.

Backing a project is more than just giving someone money. It's supporting their dream to create something that they want to see exist in the world.

Do backers get ownership or equity in the projects they fund?

No. Project creators keep 100% ownership of their work. Kickstarter cannot be used to offer financial returns or equity, or to solicit loans.

Some projects that are funded on Kickstarter may go on to make money, but backers are supporting projects to help them come to life, not to financially profit.

Everything on Kickstarter must be a project. A project has a clear goal, like making an album, a book, or a work of art. A project will eventually be completed, and something will be produced by it.

Kickstarter does not allow projects to fundraise for charity or offer financial incentives. Check out our rules for details.

Who is responsible for completing a project as promised?

It's the project creator's responsibility to complete their project. Kickstarter is not involved in the development of the projects themselves.

Kickstarter does not guarantee projects or investigate a creator's ability to complete their project. On Kickstarter, backers ultimately decide the validity and worthiness of a project by whether they decide to fund it.

How does Kickstarter make money?

If a project is successfully funded, Kickstarter applies a 5% fee to the funds collected. All pledges are processed securely by our third-party payments partner, Stripe. These payment processing fees work out to roughly 3-5%. View the fee breakdowns.

“I was living in New Orleans in late 2001 and I wanted to bring a pair of DJs down to play a show during the 2002 Jazz Fest. I found a great venue and reached out to their management, but in the end the show never happened—it was just too much money...”

The fact that the potential audience had no say in this decision stuck uncomfortably in my brain. I thought: “What if people could go to a site and pledge to buy tickets for a show? And if enough money was pledged they would be charged and the show would happen. If not, it wouldn't.”

I loved the idea, but I was focused on making music, not starting an internet company. Yet slowly over the next few years I started to work on the idea more and more. In the spring of 2005 I moved back home to NYC, knowing it would be much more possible there.

Once back in New York, I started to try and tackle the next steps: Who could build the website? How much it would cost? Where could I get money? I talked to a bunch of folks and I learned a ton. I planned and planned.

In the fall of 2005, I met Yancey Strickler, and we became fast friends. Yancey soon joined me in brainstorming. We bought a whiteboard. We had big dreams. I convinced some friends to give us a little bit of money. At some point I made this rough design of the site. Clearly we needed more help.

About a year later, I was introduced to Charles Adler, through an old friend. The day after we were introduced, Charles came over to my apartment and he and I started working together almost every day. After months and months of collaboration, we ended up with wireframes and specifications for the site.

But none of us could code. We had a few false starts hiring people to build the site. There were months where not much happened. Charles moved to San Francisco and took some part-time freelance work. Yancey was still at his day job. We had this money from our friends and not much was happening. It was emotionally draining.

In the summer of 2008 things finally started to move again. I was introduced to Andy Baio, who, though he was living in Portland, started to help us out. Soon after, Charles and Andy found a few developers — including Lance Ivy all the way in Walla Walla, Washington. We were a scattered team that lived through Skype and email (Charles had moved again, this time to Chicago), but we were finally building — even as the economy started to collapse.

Finally, on April 28, 2009, we launched Kickstarter to the public. We told as many friends as possible, and Andy announced it on his awesome blog Waxy.org. Projects trickled in. Yancey jumped into gear to handle all the new emails from people actually using (or wanting to use) Kickstarter. It was amazing! You cannot imagine how excited we all were.

There are so many projects that defined the early days. Designing Obama, Robin Writes a Book, and Mysterious Letters were all landmarks. Filmmakers took their natural-born hustle and wrapped it around our template. People stepped up to support projects over and over again. It was thrilling. And then one day we even had an office. In January 2010, nine months after we launched, we moved into a tenement building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan along with Cassie Marketos and Fred Benenson, our two new teammates.

But before all that, three weeks after Kickstarter launched, a young singer-songwriter from Athens, GA, launched a project to fund her album, Allison Weiss was Right All Along. Allison was using Kickstarter in the exact way we had always dreamed. Her album was funded in one day. She did a Skype chat with the backer that put her over her goal and posted it for all to see. This was the moment Kickstarter was truly alive.”

Perry Chen

Charles Adler

Charles Adler is a co-founder of Kickstarter. Charles served as Kickstarter's Head of Design through fall 2013. He now serves as an advisor. Prior to Kickstarter, Charles co-founded the online art publication Subsystence as well as Source-ID, an independent interaction design studio.

Perry Chen

Perry Chen is an artist and the principal founder of Kickstarter, where he serves as CEO and Chairman. Perry grew up in New York City and lived for eight years in New Orleans, where he worked on music and had the idea for Kickstarter. He was the company’s CEO through 2013, then returned to the position in 2017. His art has been exhibited in New York, Berlin and Mexico City.

Yancey Strickler

Yancey Strickler is a co-founder of Kickstarter. Yancey served as Kickstarter's Head of Community, Head of Communications and CEO from 2014 through the summer of 2017. Prior to Kickstarter, he was a music journalist whose writing appeared in
The Village Voice,
New York
magazine, Pitchfork, and other publications.

“Kickstarter is a truly amazing platform. Not just for the funding, but for the creative connections, the confidence and drive it gives you as a creator, and the public space it provides to showcase something you feel passionately about.”

— Yasmin Khan

Highlights

Thirteen Kickstarter-funded films have been nominated for Academy Awards. (One of them, Inocente, took home an Oscar in 2013.) Kickstarter-funded albums have topped Billboard charts, won Grammy Awards, and given music-industry legends newfound creative freedom. We’ve watched artworks go on to be exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, the Kennedy Center, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian, and the American Folk Art Museum. We’ve seen comics nominated for Eisner Awards, dances performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company, new inventions adopted by tech giants, and at least a dozen items launched into space. One project even won the American Helicopter Society’s elusive Sikorsky Prize, unclaimed for thirty years.

Kickstarter projects come in all sizes — and from newsmaking creations to whole movements of small, personal projects, they’re building the culture of tomorrow.